As traders continued to assess the implications of a bearish miss in the latest government inventory data, particularly in light of missing demand from downtime at a major U.S. export terminal, natural gas futures pared some of their recent losses early Friday.

NGI Morning Natural Gas Price & Markets Coverage

Coming off a 61.9-cent walloping in the previous session, the July Nymex contract was up 3.4 cents to $6.273/MMBtu at around 8:45 a.m. ET. August was up 4.4 cents to $6.327.

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) on Thursday reported a larger-than-expected 74 Bcf injection into Lower 48 storage for the week ended June 17. The build lifted inventories to 2,169 Bcf, 331 Bcf below the five-year average.

The EIA report offered an important early gauge of the impact of an extended outage at the Freeport liquefied...